The ordinary American knows who Adolf Hitler is, as we should. We are constantly taught about the Holocaust and how he orchestrated a massacre of more than 10 million people. We ought to learn about that. So, why aren’t we educated about a genocide that King Leopold II oversaw 3 decades before the Holocaust?
The American educational system is facing criticism for avoiding and downplaying certain historical events, driven by political pressure and localized control of curriculum. The creation of curriculum and educational standards results in ambiguous educational ideals, which eventually causes students to suffer from a lack of well-rounded education. The federal government is responsible for standardized testing even though it has no control over what is taught in K-12 public schools. In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act was approved by Congress and backed by former President Bush, which was to assess students in math and English.
Later in 2015, President Obama required every state to measure performance in science as well. Why is history missing from this list? The American Educational System fails to touch subjects below the surface, and instead glosses over events like World War I and the Revolutionary War because the U.S. is on the winning side, and fighting for the better. However, the U.S. does not participate in many of the historical events that are not taught; the primary focus of what’s taught has just always revolved around its presence. These are some significant historical occurrences you should be aware of.
King Leopold II
In 1884, European powers split Africa. They partitioned it. They basically exclaimed, ‘Hey, I want this country because it has this resource.’ King Leopold wanted the Congo, and he created the Congo Free State and oversaw it from 1885 to 1908. This was during the period of a rubber boom worldwide; people needed rubber for cars, hoses, and bikes. Guess where you can find a lot of rubber? The Congo. This caused King Leopold to utilize secret police to basically enslave the people of the Congo Free State to extract rubber.
In those 200 or so years, historians estimate that he exterminated over 15 million Congolese people. Not only did he exterminate this many people, but they also estimate that the population of the Congo shrank from 20 million to 10 million people. It is very problematic that we have this massive gap in our educational system, because it seems that when it’s people of color that are being genocided, it is often overlooked. You would think King Leopold lived around the 1700s, but no, Leopold and Hitler were alive at the same time. His rule over the Congo ended in 1908, and he died in 1909. What King Leopold did in the Congo can be traced to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s instability to this day, and established the path and precedent for the continued exploitation of Africa’s riches.
Remember Kent State! Remember Jackson State!
The Vietnam War was significantly unpopular with the American public, especially college students. In 1970, it became clear that the United States was going to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Now, many people know about the Kent State shootings, on May 4, 1970, the Ohio State National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State College students who were protesting the war. Nine students were injured, and four students died from this incident. They were identified as Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Schroeder. But, many people don’t know that about two weeks later, two more students were arrested at Jackson State, in Jackson, Mississippi, for protesting the same exact thing.
The week of May 15, 1970, students at Jackson State were protesting the Vietnam War for three straight nights. Not only did they protest because they were upset that Black men were being sent over to Vietnam to serve a country that was substantially racist and did not love them, but they were also protesting the Vietnam War itself and the racism that they were experiencing in Jackson, Mississippi. On the night of May 15, 1970, the Jackson City police fired on a group of protesting students. Twenty-one-year-old law student Phillip Gibbs and 17-year-old high school student James Earl Green were murdered, and 12 other people were wounded. These accounts show how young people have always been fighting against the United States’ war-mongering and destabilization of other nations, and they have lost their lives doing so.
Why is Africa so small on Maps?
Africa is the second-largest continent in the world by population and land mass. But if you go to school in America, you probably would not know that; you might be wondering why. Most of the American schools, nine out of ten at least, follow the Mercator map, named after the 16th-century European cartographer, Geradus Mercator. Mercator originally made this map for European explorers to map the seas. The map was originally made for globes, but when he transferred it to flat paper, it had awkward, stretched gaps near the poles. So his solution was to take all the continents and the countries that were near the poles, and stretch them out and distort their sizes. But Africa, however, near the equator, stayed the same original size that he originally drew it. So many were left with a eurocentric map that makes you believe Greenland and Africa are the same size, when in reality, Greenland is the same size as the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country inside the continent of Africa. And it is no coincidence that this map has been used for over 400 years, because European countries and Western powers can use it as a political tool. It can also be used as a tool of imperialism, colonialism, and knowledge. However, I would look at the Peters projection map, which gives continents like South America and Africa a more accurate representation.
Whether you have learned about these subjects or not, the American Educational System has been increasingly siding with standardized STEM/ELA testing, and in more than 20 states have passed laws restricting topics of history, mainly race and inequality, to be taught. The “Patriotic” Education Focus has been covered with fear of “Controversy” because of political pressure, which should not be a valid reason to not teach these major/minor subjects from the past.
